Tag: Physical-computing

People have complex relationships with their own (and other’s) bodies. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), it is believed that your feet are a map of your body and can provide valuable information about your physical condition – when you are able to read them, of course.

Some people experience ghost limbs that have long been amputated, or have out-of-body experiences, whereas prosthesis can feel completely natural. On the other hand, many people experience a sense of detachment, or alienation, by the technology that surrounds them. Will we ever experience technology not only as extensions of our body, but as part of our body? Peculiar image by Lieke de Blank.

Wearable technologies – any technology worn close to or on the body – currently exist in two spaces: as conceptual pieces by artists and designers, and as engineering-driven wearable products that are taken to market.
Researcher Danielle Wilde explains how the future for wearable technologies lies in creating products with expressive aesthetic qualities.

This year take your Easter egg decorating to the next level! Egg-Bot is a machine that applies computer controlled motion to precisely decorate your eggs for you with gorgeous designs. Robots, is there anything they won’t do? Happy Easter!

Almost one year ago we reported about the first full-face transplant using 3D-printed bones in Belgium. Now the first 3D-printed skull has been implanted on a 22 years old Dutch women, affected by a rare bone disease.

They say the map is the territory. Hence, when scientists manage to map your brain in a real time video, this will have an impact on one of the most uncultivated territories known to man: the territory of your inner space.
Buckle up for some tracking technologies beyond the beyond.

Why not outsource your laser engraving jobs to termites? It is cheap, messy and time consuming, but you’ll definitely get a unique and personal result. For more on how to design with living matter, head over to the IDEO Made in the Future site.

Music lovers have always found a way to play a tune using everyday objects, such as pots and pans, tables or garbage cans. This habit has now digitally evolved thanks to Mogees, a device that can virtually turn all the stuff around us into unusual musical instruments.

Drones are typically thought of as flying spying robots, or even worse flying spying shooting robots. But could we also employ drones for good? Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos certainly thinks so. In a 60 Minutes interview, he announced that Amazon wants to use octocopters to deliver your order within a half hour at any location you choose.

Really. According to United States Patent Application 20130297301, this is one of Google’s latest ideas to make your smartphone even smaller and even more closely connected to you than you had ever imagined.

Thanks to new technologies, life sciences now have to face the age of big data. With advances in genome sequencing, imaging and other technology, biologists and neuroscientists are generating data very quickly. According to David Relman, a physician and microbiologist at Stanford University:

“We are now faced with the daunting challenge of trying to understand the system from the perspective of all this big data, with not nearly as much biology with which to interpret it. The whole genome can fit on a CD, but the brain is comparable to the digital content of the world”.

To go through the big data revolution, scientists will need to develop data analysis tools and to get used to the concept of sharing their data.